Should be live in a week or so, depending on the gods of CMS development.

Beta Preview

ItalTek, in my opinion, is not only a great producer, but also embraces the idea that free music and paid music can live side by side without great stress. In testament to that (If you don’t already know his amazing Net-Lab releases), here is the new homepage for his self-publishing label AtomRiver, featuring a free download of Lightning Fields as well as links to buy the physical and MP3 releases (below).

So show your support for the Emo Junglist!

http://www.atomriver.co.uk/Lightning_Fields.mp3

• ItalTek MySpace
• ItalTek on BoomKat
• ItalTek on Bleep

Für unsere Freunde in Berlin, Check out Open Music’s SteveD playing live at Kultur-able}.

Sunday June 11th, 20.00
Hobrechtstraße 28 Berlin, Neukölln
Details hier.

http://www.thisisopenmusic.com/data/mp3/bruiser.mp3

• Download “Subjektive”
•  Last.FM
•  MySpace

Free Culture.

- A presentation given by Stanford Law professor and founder of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, about his book “Free Culture”.

++ New Releases ++

Various Artists - OPN006 Primer 02

Piratio’ - OPN007 User Illusions II

John Cohen - OPN008 Noise Pollution

Lorn - OPN009 7&13 EP

Polaroid Android - OPN010 Definicje

Have pity on this Mechanical Mariner - OPN011 Part One.

Goblin Glasses - OPN012 Mothership ‘88

++ Coming Soon ++

New releases from Armand Tansarian, Jimmy the Hideous Penguin Boy, another Primer compilation and more… Thanks for visiting our cool little site and we hope you come back soon.

The Open Music team.

I really enjoy throwing on this album when I’m chilling in my room, looking out the window and smoking a cigarette. Mothership ‘88 is a slim-down wonky-ish sut of So Cal hip hop. There’s something amazing about american ambient that’s never cold and isolating, even when there’s no strong groove. It’s flavoured with the influence of Dilla, Doom and Heat Sensor, but there are also elements that remind me of Ultra Milkmaids, Caribou and Colleen too.

Highlights are Goblin Tree, Goblins in Outta Space and Can’t Fathom.

Check it.

http://www.thisisopenmusic.com/data/mp3/fathom.mp3

• Artist’s Profile
•  Last.FM
•  MySpace
•  Website
•  Vimeo

The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions and zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam;

- Dennis Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas USA

http://www.thisisopenmusic.com/data/mp3/bowly.mp3

PLUS!

There is a special bonus track from Mechanical Mariner, “Mekta Kita” on OPN006 Primer 02!

• Artist’s Profile
•  Last.FM
•  MySpace
• Have pity on this Mechanical Mariner on OPN006 Primer 02

I met Polaroid Android in the CRK squat, Wroc?aw in 2008 while touring around with Tupolew (featuring members of Gestammelorchester as featured on OPN006 Primer 02), where he and the other residents cooked for and entertained us. Mid-conversation, he dragged me into his studio, turned up the bass-end and played me Polaroid Anroid, from start to finish. I was very very drunk on dodgy yellow Polish vodka and nodded my way through the whole thing, pretty assured that I was having a good time with Hubert, the friendliest, jolliest anti-fascist punk I’ve met. Groggy the next morning, we set off towards the next venue and somehow I found ‘Husbands’ (an early demo of M??owie) and ‘Definicje’ on my iPod. I listened to it over and over and over…

This album is for people who like Company Flow, Cannibal Ox, D-Styles, Public Enemy or even PIL. Highlights include Kocham Wielkiego Brata, Wolno?? S?owa and, my favourite, M??owie; a track about domestic violence. I don’t know what it is about this tune, but, even though I can’t understand a word, I absolutely believes that she means it. And that’s dope.

8 tracks of dark-as-fuck hip-hop about nasty things in the world that need to be put right.

http://www.thisisopenmusic.com/data/mp3/mezowie.mp3

Update:

Because of the complexities of organising a release on 3 labels simultaneously, plus the added complexities of one of those labels being a free label and not forgetting Open Music’s wish to not negatively affect the possibility of Polaroid Android, Anteny Krzyku & Qulturap losing lots of money, OPN010 - Polaroid Android - Definicje will stay in the ‘Coming Soon’ for now.

Show your appreciation for Polaroid Android now by leaving a comment and we’ll make a big song and dance when it drops!

Open Music Crew

• Artist’s Profile
•  Last.FM
•  MySpace
• Qulturap Label
• Anteny Krzyku Label
• Gestammelorchester on OPN006 Primer 02

In the quest to find new music for Open Music, I often just cruise MySpace looking for artists that I can approach. Often, I don’t really pay attention to what’s on the page. It kinda goes ‘Load,,, tune,,, skip,,, tune,,, skip… ah!!!! send message’… and so on. So, having never heard of Lorn before [and I like to think of myself as a bit of a chin-stroker] I thought.. “Cool… Savage beats from the US for Open… People will love this.” I put up a little status update saying ‘New Lorn release on Open’ and then the emails started to arrive… Lots of them. It seems that he is already loved, worldwide, and I was just behind the times…

Salad Toss!

Lorn rules. End of story.

http://www.thisisopenmusic.com/data/mp3/899.mp3

• Artist’s Profile
•  Last.FM
•  MySpace
• Facebook Fan Page
• Edie [Lorn Side-Project]
• Omega Clash [Lorn Side-Project]

I love John Cohen. His eponymous release on Net-Lab is awesome. I love his music so much, that I couldn’t think of a single thing to say about this release that didn’t sound biased (We’re in Dead Fader together) or just plain sycophantic. So instead, I’m going to paste in a badly translated paragraph from a review by French musician and writer Stephane Obadia [aka Nudist with Laptop(Wrong Music) and Rob Steady (Net-Lab)]- if you fancy your french, the full review is linked below. He’s also our featured artist of the moment on the front page.

How to describe it; it’s like after a great cataclysm… a few scattered traces of life on the earth’s surface. And there, we try to get in touch with our loved ones. It’s very cinematic listening this music is like seeing a film in a blockbuster with lots of bass… really full… Except that you are urged to imagine behind your eyelids, behind the deluge of sound John, the Apocalypse according to Cohen, is complacent in the dark, hoping, destroying everything. It is just a magnificent universe projected by the brain of this young man of 18, the age when he recorded this disc… And I can not help but find it incredible to make a record like this at 18. I can not help but imagine that it would do him a world of good to listen to something like “ça fait rire les oiseaux”, or offer him a home for life in a haunted southern England castle, for it saves a lot of great hymns and other large pieces of this kind. Beaches in the area where violence is always latent (sometimes it looks like a storm in the mountains), benefits for wandering ghosts on the premises of their misfortunes.

http://www.thisisopenmusic.com/data/mp3/hybrid.mp3

• Artist’s Profile
•  Last.FM
•  MySpace
• Full Review by Stephane Obadia (French Language)
• Obadia MySpace